T'aakshi

T’aakshi gritted his teeth, trying to give himself a break from their near-constant chattering. It was lucky there was no wind. Even without it, the glacial air bit sharply at any exposed skin it could find, and any scrap of moisture exposed to it froze within seconds. 

The Deep Wastes of Tagaya were even more brutal than the rest of it, barren of almost anything but rock and ice and ocean—provided you lived long enough to reach it. The skies in this place barely brightened beyond the light of early evening twilight, providing just enough light to see by, but never enough to be entirely sure you weren’t being watched. Every rock formation cast long, reaching shadows because of it, and to him, each looked as though it might hide some new danger.

As he peered out into the gloom, searching for any sign of T’aarak, or their actual quarry, the rest of his party was resting around their hastily made campfire, warming themselves after yet another day of fruitless walking. They were all exhausted and hungry, and the lurking threat of starvation had quashed any initial eagerness to adventure on the part of the younger members of their party. 

A week’s walking had decimated their scant supplies, no matter how careful they had been with them, and now food was becoming an absolute priority. With careful rationing, they had enough for four hungry days, but by that point, they would have weakened considerably.

Not for the first time, the subtle cerulean glow of the tanae embedded in his spear drew his eye. It held his gaze. It’s strange, shifting surface sometimes seemed impossible to look away from. With this, he could access the memories of men and women who had walked these parts of the Wastes thousands of times. People who knew the best places to find food, or medicinal herbs, or even the best shelters from the weather when it got too severe. 

His father had used it for exactly those purposes, checking in with their predecessors for guidance when it they needed it most. Now he needed it. His people needed it. He couldn’t afford failure, especially not to fail because he had led his party to starvation. It would be so easy to reach out his hand and take the answers he needed.

T’aakshi sighed, and he tore his eyes away from the jewel’s misty blue exterior. He had given his word that he wouldn’t use it—sworn it on his father’s honour, even. He couldn’t break his word at the first hurdle, no matter how badly he wanted to.

He turned back to their makeshift camp, but hesitated before moving. T’aallin was staring at him, a frown marring his face. Did he know about the tanae? And if he did, did he know about the promise he’d made not to use it? It seemed unlikely that he would—the Inari-da kept anything like Self, or the tanae under a tight veil of secrecy. T’aallin had turned away and started toward the fire already, but the way he had been looking, like he knew exactly what T’aakshi had been thinking, had him swallowing heavily as he strode back to the fireside.

T’aajiro was waiting for him as joined the group huddled around the fire, his outstretched arm holding out a chunk of cured meat for him. 

“Don’t even think about it,” he said, eyebrows pointedly raised. He flushed, though it would have been impossible to notice past his red, cold-raw cheeks, and stopped searching for somebody else to pass the food along to. “Our intrepid leader is no good to us with starvation dimming his wits.”

T’aakshi snorted and took the piece, clapping Jiro on the back. Instead of acknowledging it, the younger hunter tore a chunk out of his own piece and chewed as though he’d not even spoken. A week ago, T’aakshi might have been offended, but this seemed to be just how Jiro was. Not that he was unfriendly, or rude. He just kept quieter than most. His dry, borderline mocking sense of humour, however, had taken a little longer to learn to appreciate. 

“It’s okay, Shi, don’t push yourself—I’ll take that off your hands if you like?”

On the other side of the fire, T’aahota leaned back on his hide blanket, grinning madly. He and his twin sister, S’aakachi, sat beside each other eating their own pieces, raised hoods failing to hide the shock of flame-red hair both had. The two of them were an anomaly among the Su’roi. Being orphans from outside of the tribe, both with paler skin and a natural hair colour that, to his knowledge, had never been seen among Tagaya’s many tribes, made certain that they would always stand out, even among their own people. 

But the pair had never let it show that it affected them, at least not in public. Wherever they had come from, they had taken to the ways of their new home as easily as any that had been born there. They were hard workers, and at fifteen, had earned the right to join the hunts in the Deep Wastes incredibly early.

T’aakshi returned the younger man’s grin. “Don’t be ridiculous, Hota. Jiro only got offered it because I don’t want him to starve—I’m less convinced about you.” 

Kachi chuckled beside her brother, and wound up choking on her food. Hota’s own laugh escalated into a full-blown cackle at his sister’s predicament, even as he slapped her back to help with the choking. T’aallin held on to his own laughter only until Kachi recovered enough to thump her brother on the arm, knocking the meat from his grasp and into the snow. 

Only S’aari remained unaffected by the carnage of the twins. She sat cross-legged slightly apart from the rest, hands clasped together in her lap, her eyes reflecting the flickering light of the fire. T’aakshi stood and shuffled around the fire as the rest continued to enjoy the twins’ continuing bickering. He hesitated next to her.

“Mind if I sit?” he asked, keeping his voice low. “I don’t want to intrude if you’d prefer no company.”

“I don’t mind, T’aakshi.”

He smiled and knelt down at her left, and joined her in gazing into the dancing firelight.

“I have no idea how those two are still going. It’s like poking at each other gives them energy, rather than costing them,” he said.

“I am not so easily distracted from our purpose. This nonsense is a waste of our energies.”

T’aakshi raised an eyebrow at her bluntness. “They haven’t forgotten why we’re here, S’aari.”

“How can you say that with our entire camp behaving like children barely out from behind their mother’s furs?”

His first thought was that the twins were not too far off from being just that, but thought better of voicing it. Part of him understood where S’aari was coming from. They had been tasked with killing a creature that was like nothing any of the Su’roi had seen before, that had already slaughtered a good number of their people. They were walking, half-starved, to their likely deaths. 

“They don’t behave like that because they’ve forgotten the danger. They’re behaving like that because they haven’t. It’s only been a week, and already our supplies are low. We have met nothing dangerous, but we’re still walking a fine line between life and death, toward an enemy that has us all pissing our boots. They’re behaving like that because they know that if we run into the beast tomorrow, tonight might be the last time they can.”

S’aari fell silent for a moment, the gentle hissing of their seal-blubber fire still audible over the antics happening on the other side of it.

“You would, at the very least, make a better Chief than I would, T’aakshi,” she said finally. “You are right. I think I am just finding it difficult to be apart from my family. This is my first hunt since Ri and I adopted Toru. We waited so long—it is hard to know I might never see him again.”

There was nothing T’aakshi could say to that, no promise he could truthfully make that would ease that pain. Before this hunt, he had thought that the expectation of people weighed heavily on him. Now that he was leading a hunt, expectation had become responsibility, and the boulders strapped to his back had grown into mountains. 

So, instead of trying to find the right words, he simply sat with her in a strangely comfortable silence, letting the sounds of the fire fill his mind.

That night, sleeping beneath the stars, there were no dreams. 

He stirred under his blanket, stretching out muscles so stiff from the cold, it was as though they had actually been frozen. T’aallin was the only other hunter awake, already adding a small amount of fuel to their fire—enough to warm them and boil some snow for the day’s water supply before they left.

“Morning, lad,” he said. “I was hoping you would be up first—I have a plan.”

T’aakshi sat up, suddenly awake. “For food, or the beast?”

“The first, lad. I’m an old man who occasionally remembers things, not a miracle worker.”

“Well, let’s hear it, then!”

T’aallin grinned, and rubbed at his chin as though thinking was especially difficult, brushing away the frozen moisture in his beard like snow.

“I couldn’t be sure last night—we got here too late—so I said nothing. But as the sun came up this morning, I knew I was right. I know that rock formation. Passed it on a good few hunts in my time.”

T’aallin nodded towards a scattered set of enormous rocks in the east, the sun sitting just above them, bathing them in its amber rays. The rocks themselves looked more like rubble than part of the landscape, as though a giant had mined them from the ground. They were ruined and crumbling, with twisted rods of what looked like rusted iron protruding violently from some.

“You know somewhere close by we can get food?”

“Close enough,” he said, grin sliding away from his face. “If my memory serves me right—and that’s a big if, mind you—then there is a frozen lake about a two-day walk from here. I’ve fished it once before on a hunt—it was plentiful enough back then that we could properly stock up for the rest of the hunt.”

“If your memory is right, old man.”

“Aye, lad. I’ll not lie, it would be a gamble. If we go and I’m wrong, we’re done.”

T’aakshi sighed, the relief he had been feeling at an uninterrupted night’s rest crushed under the mountain of responsibility he now carried.

“True enough. But we’re done either way if we don’t find any food. It’s tenuous, but it’s the best idea we’ve got.”

He paused, eyes drifting to the spear he’d left beside his bedroll, and it’s jewel. Was he making the right call? There was no way to know without giving in and using the tanae. No! The force with which the thought came to him caught him off guard, but he still turned away from the sphere, and set his jaw. He wouldn’t give up. Not yet. It wasn’t just his own pride, his own honour that he was trying to preserve, after all. 

“Wake the others,” he said, already reaching for his spear to begin packing. “I’ll not have us starve out because I was too cautious. Besides, you’re not senile quite yet, old man.”